The Life of Sir Stamford Raffles.

BOULGER, DEMITRIUS CHARLES [DR. JOHN BASTIN - FOREW.].

ISBN 10: 9054960299 / ISBN 13: 9789054960294

Published by Amsterdam-Kuala Lumpur, The Pepin Press. 1999, 1999

About this Item

Original publisher's purple paper-covered boards, white lettering spine & frontcover, pictorial dustjacket, thick large 8vo: frontispiece, xliv, 404pp., illustrations, map, list & references illustrations, index subjects. Very fine copy. Facsimile original edition 1897.

Seller Inventory # 150002

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Life of Sir Stamford Raffles.
• Publisher: Amsterdam-Kuala Lumpur, The Pepin Press. 1999
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9054960299
• ISBN 13: 9789054960294
• Binding: Hardcover
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

In 1819 Singapore was a flat, swampy and densely wooded island with few inhabitants. But Raffles saw the possibilities of developing it as an entrepot on the Calcutta - Canton route and as a British stronghold to prevent Dutch domination of the Malacca Straits. "It has been my good fortune," he wrote, "to establish this station in a position combining every possible advantage, geographical and local." In three months it had a population of around three thousand, and in three years the population rose to ten thousand. Within twenty years of the founding of Singapore, China was entered, Hong Kong taken over and a row of treaty ports opened up. The foundation of Singapore had secured for Britain the Eastern seas.
Raffles had a long career in the East; where he had been sent by the East India Company which he had entered at the age of fourteen as a clerk. He rose rapidly in the Company and unlike most of his contemporaries devoted his spare time to studying the languages, culture and zoology of the East. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1817, and on his final return from the East founded the London Zoo with Sir Humphrey Davy.
His achievement in developing Singapore was largely unrecognised in his life time; but towards the end of the nineteenth century his reputation grew and the Life of Sir Stamford Raffles appeared in 1897. The author, Demetrius Charles Boulger, drew on material in the India Office Records and received access to all the documents in the possession of the Raffles family.